Game Center, now on OS X as well as iOS, is Apple’s online leader board and game matching system. It lets you challenge your friends for both real-time as well as asynchronous multiplayer gaming, as well as give you bragging rights each time you beat out your frenemy’s high score on a Mac game you both play.
Did you know, however, that Game Center also lets you challenge your buddies on iOS, as well? With Two Towers, you can issue your challenge from your Mac, and your friend will be able to accept that challenge on their iPhone or iPad. You can then both play together, cross-platform. Cool, right? Here’s how to make it work.
Saving space on your Mac’s hard drive is more important than ever, especially if you use one with a faster but smaller solid state drive in it, like my Macbook Air. Being able to manage your space wisely is the key here, and once you’ve done the obvious things, like pare down your Applications folder and delete all those iMovie source files, it’s time to get trick, and a bit advanced.
Here’s five things that you can do to get rid of hard drive bloat, if you dare.
When Siri was updated along with iOS 6, we showed you a bunch of ways to use Apple’s personal digital assistant the right way, like using punctuation and finding out the weather.
Yet time marches ever onward, and we’ve compiled yet another five tips and tricks to help you master Siri, whether you’re looking to create a secure password or just pass the time with a few laughs. Enjoy!
If you’ve tried to use Siri to call or text someone, you know it’s pretty simple. Just say, for example, “Call Joe Smith,” and Siri will call the person named Joe Smith in your Contacts App.
But did you know that Siri can also identify people via their relationship to you? You can say, “Call my brother,” or “Text my daughter,” and Siri will call or text that person, provided you’ve done a little set-up in the Contacts app.
You can also use Siri to define these relationships, so you don’t even have to open Contacts. Here’s how.
Warning – this tip is fairly advanced. Use it at your own risk.
There’s a feature that debuted back in 2005, called SafeSleep. Basically, it’s a hibernation mode designed to save the current state of your running Mac, so that it can start up exactly the same way you left it when you put the Mac to sleep, even if the battery runs out and it shuts down completely.
In OS Lion, Apple introduced two new features, called Autosave and Resume which mirrors this functionality. Turning off SafeSleep, then, is really just disabling a duplicate feature. It shouldn’t affect Autosave or Resume if you’re running OS Lion or later, and it could potentially save you gigabytes of hard drive space.
Here’s how to do it, though we caution you not to do this if you’re even slightly uncomfortable with the idea.
One of my daughter’s favorite things to do with Siri on my iPhone, besides rename me all sorts of ridiculous names, is to ask it questions. “Siri,” she’ll say, “what is your real name?” Siri will reply with how she really doesn’t like talking about herself. Hilarious, right?
I’m almost afraid to show her this tip, then, because she’ll now have a ton of questions to ask Siri, getting truly funny and cute responses along the way. I may never get my iPhone back.
Here is a list of some of the best, but we’ll leave finding out the answers to you, and your own version of Siri.
There are many files that help make your system usable, but they can build up over time. System logs, for example, keep track of usage, errors, and services running on your Mac, but unless you look at these often via an app like Console, you’ll probably not need a ton of log files taking up space on your Mac, especially if you have one with a low-volume SSD.
QuickLook cache files make your Mac feel zippy when you hit the spacebar to preview files in the Finder or Open/Save dialogs. If you can stand a bit of a wait to do this, deleting these files can save you some space as well.
Put together, you might save a decent amount of space on your hard drive, so give it a shot. Here’s how.
As you may know, Siri is backed by the seriously amazing knowledge web site, Wolfram Alpha, which makes dynamic computations about your search terms based on a its own collection of built-in data, special algorithms, and other secret fancy methods. Or, to put it another way: magic.
Anyway, Siri taps into Wolfram Alpha and can come up with some great stuff, like calculating tips for you, for example. Siri’s connection to Wolfram can do even more than that, like generating a secure password for you. Here’s how.
I suppose since I’m a gamer, I assume everyone else is. If you’re not, or you don’t use the fantastic cross-platform digital gaming portal, Steam, this tip won’t apply to you. Check out the last couple of tips for great space saving ideas, instead. Or, heck, read a review or two on Cult of Mac. I hear they’re pretty good.
For you Steam gamers looking to save some space on your hard drive, there’s one place you should really look.
Talking to Siri can be either an exercise in frustration, or a miracle of modern technology, depending on your mood and how successful the Apple digital assistant is at interpreting what it is you’re asking. Typically, when you activate Siri with a long press and hold on the Home button, the input is collected via the microphone built into your iPHone or iPad.
If you have a Bluetooth accessory, though, you might not know that Siri can listen through that device as well. Here’s how to get Siri to do just that.
